“What…are satellites? Kills me how?” His heart pounded and he felt faint.
“Satellites are the things you see in the sky moving through the night on intervals. They existed before but the Island scientists have new ones. Look, you need to throw that thing in the ocean before filament disintegrates and you start foaming at the mouth…”
Kozo saw the woman’s calm nod and with renewed disgust, he stood and flicked the tiny square out into the water.
“They were going to kill me no matter what,” Kozo said and stared at the dark blue waves, recognition and fear on his face. When he’d been made captain of the Queen by default, he’d read the old journals and tried to understand the world beyond. Kozo believed it would be better. “I made her come with me. I promised her things. I truly thought it could be different off the trash…”
“Yeah. You’re in good company. Look, let our surgeon here get that gouge cleaned up and get your bearings. Then we’ll talk,” the man answered.
He turned to leave, and as he walked away Kozo almost didn’t notice that one of the man’s legs was gone. A well worn prosthetic moved with him, but it was clearly old and plastic—like something that would’ve washed up on his trash islands. The plastic had no toes and appeared hollow, a gash was cut from the calf. If it affected his gait much, Kozo couldn’t tell.
“Who are you?” Kozo asked again. He stood. His eyes scanned the ocean and he saw his boat floating away—the coordinates to his sister disappeared with the surf. Soon, the small boat would fold into the ocean entirely as most things did in time.
“I’m Ethan,” he said with his hand on his chest in warm affection. “My co-captain, Ainsley.” He nodded to two younger men waiting at the railing for introduction. “My brothers. Malcolm and Monroe. This is the Mama Maxine 14…my rescue vessel. Now finish your tea and get downstairs; the kids are gonna fire up this engine and get us away from the transponder languishing in the boat and the other one floating in the waves before someone loses patience with your slowness and comes to see if you’ve offed yourself.”
“Does that happen often enough to be more believable?” Kozo asked, confused.
“That’s usually what they think when the transponders don’t travel,” the woman introduced as Ainsley replied. “The ocean makes people crazy, though. The hunger. They always think a few jump of their own accord and try to swim to non-existent lands. Either way. We gotta get out of the way.” She stood and followed the one-legged man to the door leading to the hull.
“I’ve only lived on the ocean,” Kozo announced, not sure why he felt like picking a fight with someone who might have saved his life. “Am I crazy?”
“Too soon to tell,” Ainsley nodded. “But I’m not that kind of doctor.”
Picking up people in the ocean was their job.
When Kozo was done with his tea, he moved down into the belly of the boat, freshly stitched, and they explained with delicate attention what they’d learned about the coordinates he’d been given—where they went and where he was headed. He watched them talk, measured and rehearsed, each of them knowing a part and the beats—he wondered what happened to all the other people they pulled from boats in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?
This was clearly a well-oiled operation. I’ve never heard of you, Kozo thought, but then again they’d never entertained traveling east.
“The transponder has a compass and a map with directions. They let you sit out here long enough to become sick and thirsty, seeing things on the horizon. Then they get you to shore. Languishers often get bailed out, but the determined ones, well, sometimes they’re off into unsafe waters before we can scoop them up,” Ethan explained. He talked and while he talked, he rotated the unlit cigar between his fingers.
“This Blair Truman does this,” Kozo clarified. They’d cut the engine to save on gas and moved with the current, the boat rocked in soothing peaks and valleys, and a bell outside signaled the wind. “The woman who has my sister.”
“Yeah,” Ainsley nodded. “We’re sorry.”
“We’ll get her,” Kozo announced with confidence. “I mean…we’ll rescue her.”
The boat inhabitants all exchanged looks. Kozo spun to look hard at each of them, including the twins, which he couldn’t tell apart—he didn’t need anyone to translate their grim faces.
“No,” Ethan shook his head. “We’re gonna take you to our camp. Give you some options and let you go make your own choices about what happens next. But…no…”
“What if my option and choice is to go find my sister?” Kozo asked. “You made me leave everything in the boat, so I couldn’t know where she was if I tried. But…”
“Bermuda.”
“Excuse me?” Kozo asked.
“That’s where she is…or will be soon…an island out there. It used to be called Bermuda,” Ethan said. He set the cigar down and put his hand over it.
“What’s it called now?”
“Bermuda, I guess, still, who knows?” Ethan shrugged. “You don’t need coordinates—everything in that bag is traceable. Look, I hate being the guy to rush you right through what you’ve been missing without any build-up or excitement, but we’ve got some ground to cover.” The man stood up and began to pace back and forth. Kozo watched as he moved without effort, and couldn’t help but stare at the immobile hunk of material he used as a replacement.
“It’s my night for watch,” one of the twins said. He hugged himself into a harness and began to ascend to the deck. “The wind is steady. I think we let it carry the hull, see how far we get without diesel.”
“How many boats left in the marina?” Ethan asked and scratched his head.
Ainsley answered. “Two sailing, one more cruiser, one fishing, and a pontoon.”
“Look at the map when we get back and see how many port cities we’ve already ravaged.”
“God, really?” Ainsley deadpanned, eyes wide. “I’m not going past Brazil—”
“Let her sail, then,” Ethan said and the man continued his march to the deck. “I think I’m down to 10,000 gallons, Ains. We need to be more intentional with pick-ups.” He sighed. Kozo blushed and dipped his head, feeling the shame of costing them fuel. “But at least the weather will hold out. You hungry?” he asked Kozo, drawing him up a bit.
Kozo wasn’t hungry.
He thought of Megumi and her screams from the freezer, the way the woman stared at the painting and asked who drew it, and he couldn’t forget her sneer, the tightness of her face. The whiteness of her skin—as though she had the luxury of avoiding the sun, the wind, the harshness of life.
“I want to know more about Bermuda,” Kozo replied. “Ima.” Now.
Ethan seemed unmoved by the request but he made his way back to the hard couch where Kozo sat and settled himself across of him. He leaned down, assuming a teacherly, fatherly stance, rubbing his hands.
“Your SOS was a trap,” Ethan said. “They change the signals and the placements through the years, keep experimenting with what draws people westward. From what we can tell, they use the bodies and the people they kidnap for experiments—”
“Shichijuichi,” Kozo breathed with shock. Rebirthed from the ashes and the trash, the monsters lived and committed crimes against man, proof of darkness of the human heart. These were the reasons why the earth was destroyed. Megumi had been right; they’d set the cruise ship on a course to death, and he’d led them there like a fool.
Two ships down, and he’d thought it was just a tactical error, and yet he stayed the route and adhered to the plan, the mark of an inexperienced traveler.
“What do you mean? 731?” Ethan asked.
“It’s a place. My jiji told me. A century ago, my own people hated others so much they experimented on real men and women…” he stopped, unwilling to go into the heavy details. When his jiji told him her father was a soldier there, she could never reconcile the man who raised her with the man who cut open pregnant women to inspect their virally infected fetuses or gave dis
eases to people to study the effects. But he was dead, dead, dead—long gone. Kozo sometimes thanked the trash when he was reminded of the barbaric tendencies during every time in human history.
Mankind, Jiji once said, is good at the core, but the evil unleashed upon us grows stronger as we grow stronger. We learn. It learns. Because of complacency, we let evil outpace the good, and we lost everything.
Ainsley graciously smiled and reached out to pat his knee.
“Yeah, buddy. I understand,” Ethan said with sympathy. “My people, too.”
They sat in heavy silence before Kozo lifted his head and asked, “Megumi…she’ll be an experiment?”
“I don’t know what will specifically happen to your sister,” Ethan said with a vacant detachment that Kozo didn’t appreciate.
“We have bits and pieces about Bermuda, Kozo, not a whole picture,” Ainsley continued with more warmth, sensing Kozo’s hesitation. “We’ve assisted in two escapes from the Bermuda Project and to the mainland. But—”
“They’re all track-able,” the twin who stayed said. “Once the island military discovers they’re missing…they die. Like a switch. We didn’t know about the filament chip until recently. Bit of a game changer actually…thank her.” He nodded to Ainsley who blew off the gratitude with an eye-roll.
“We know they’ve improved bio-warfare of some sort,” Ainsley added. She paused and scrunched her long nose—she too was fair and almost pretty, but weathered. She had long brown hair and it fell in waves around her face, naturally curled from the sea salt.
“What kind of experiments?” Kozo asked more explicitly.
“We don’t really know—” Ainsley started, but Ethan clapped his hands and looked up with a sardonic scowl. She clamped her mouth shut, silenced, and added, “Fine. Be scary and make him feel worse.”
Ethan took that as an invitation. He leaned closer.
“The last one we heard about was a brother and sister pairing, so your demographic lines up. Makes sense why she spared you,” Ethan said, and he stood and began to pace as he recounted the tale off capture from some land-based group of survivors. The murdering of the adults, burning their bodies on barges out at sea in a spectacle of flame and smoke. “Sister was isolated and fed propaganda, brainwashed…skilled with the task of killing her own brother as a test of her worthiness to the group.”
Kozo swallowed. “And if the other half of her experiment fails to show up?”
“Something else then. Something …”
“Inhumane and immoral.”
Ethan nodded. “We are committed to stopping the Bermuda Project from continuing, but…”
“We are outnumbered and out-teched…you’re not just fighting a big bad guy. You’re fighting, like, the big bad guy and right now…we can’t start a fight we know we’ll lose,” Ainsley added. The ship dove and rose over waves. She turned her attention to the boat, “We’ll hit the trade winds soon. Be home in a couple hours.”
“Where do you live?” Kozo asked.
“All over,” Ainsley answered. She smiled with a tired grin and pointed to a hallway and small staircase leading up to the boat’s bedrooms. “I’m going to rest while we drift.”
She leaned over and kissed Ethan on the top of his head before she walked up the stairs and disappeared into a room on the left.
Once she was gone, Kozo turned to Ethan and stared. The man was mid-40s, maybe, rugged and still baby-faced. He bore no scars across his cheeks or the reddened eyes of a sailor. The brother, stoic and quiet, disappeared to bed as well, leaving the two of them in the open, contemplating sleep.
“Will I ever see her again?” Kozo asked with sudden desperation. A crash hit the bow, some water sprayed through an open window but he didn’t flinch.
“I don’t make those sort of calls, I’m sorry,” Ethan replied. “Not my place and not my ability. But I need to warn you…we don’t have many happy stories out this way. My family and I do what we can.” He tilted his head toward the cabins where the others slept. “We’ve been mobile a while now and seen a lot, our choice. But I’m not into spin.”
“How do you do this, pick up people, and not get caught?” Kozo asked. His head throbbed and his tongue was thick with thirst. He ran his hand through his hair and put a hand to his heart—his chest was pounding, he was growing hotter, the hull of the boat felt too small, too cramped, and Kozo stood and walked to the stairs to feel the breeze from the deck. He worried with a flash he’d been poisoned but soon he realized it must be panic.
“Sometimes we get lucky, but mostly by many acts of practiced subterfuge. And losses and learning. We learned about the upgraded silicon chips six months ago…disastrous. So, right…what else? Um, they use satellites to track movement, but a boat on the ocean isn’t gonna be noticed because there’s a shit ton of abandoned boats on the ocean just ghost-shipping their way through life until they shipwreck somewhere or we grab them. Which is eventually why we moved to the water—they’re expecting movement out there, not people. Not here, anyway. Not yet. Took them a long time to even figure out where the people from the Trash Islands were coming from. Other than that?” He shrugged. “We’re careful not to disturb things on land…in and out, around when we do venture inward, but yeah… lots of bays with lots of boats and marinas to choose from. Roll on in and point at a bobbing luxury yacht not turned on for twenty-five years. And isn’t that an image? I didn’t say life was glamorous, but we’re sure as hell getting the hang of island hopping around the Caribbean, which I mean, shit, if someone in high school told me that’s the way I’d ride out the apocalypse, I guess I wouldn’t have thought it sounded so bad…”
The man laughed and flashed his teeth—too white and nice, it was disarming. He drummed his fingers on the table and sniffed away the mirth, settling into a lost reverie. He sighed again, perhaps contemplating the usefulness of his knowledge or his time out at sea—high school, he’d said so breezily as if that was a type of school Kozo would know about.
“Gomenasai,” Ethan added and dipped his head. “That was insensitive.”
“So, then I take it you didn’t come from and have never been to the Trash Islands?” Kozo asked, tilting his gaze and watching as Ethan shrugged an affirmative. He didn’t understand this man’s existence versus his own. He’d lived on water, afraid of land, at the whim of the weather and the tides to bring them treasures from the gods of the waves. But Ethan lived on land and had taken to water as a choice. It seemed they had competing desires and Kozo didn’t like the idea of land as an inaccessible albatross. That was why he wanted to join the cruise ships; to spend some part of his life without a hum and rock to his step.
“We only learned about their existence a few years ago. Again, you benefitted from natural movement through the ocean. It kept your people alive a long time… and I mean we all knew what would happen next…it’s not like I enjoy being right about the worst of human behavior, but. You know.”
“Why? How were you right? Do these people know about us?”
Ethan nodded but his expression stayed neutral. “How long were you on the boat to the SOS, Kozo?” he asked.
“Two years,” he answered. “I mean, I was on the Queen for two years. We only started the SOS journey recently.”
“Oh, man, and so you didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
A full pause hit the hull and Kozo pushed past another round of nausea.
“There’s nothing left of the Trash Islands, Kozo-san. The Islands wiped them out about three months ago. Planes. Torched and poisoned because why change the MO? Hey, man. Gomenasai. I didn’t know you didn’t know…”
Images of his one-time home flashed through his memory—and he tried to think of the watery mass of debris and sludge, boats and wooden plank walkways, plastic pathways, and the occasional whale. Those ancient beasts who survived it all, again and again.
Kozo didn’t know what his face conveyed, if he looked shocked or traumatized. His eyes felt heavy but he didn
’t cry. He wouldn’t.
His grandma died long ago. He had no father. His mother never wanted him. Maybe she didn’t make it to the poison, he thought with solace. The idea clung to him and he held it, thinking it must be true. When he left, he knew he was saying goodbye forever, he only thought he’d be the one making the decision not to return. It stung that a decision was made for him instead.
“My sister is the only family I have left,” he told the one-legged man. “Maybe even one of the few Japanese descendants left…and I will die trying to rescue her. I wasn’t taught to be afraid of death…how could I? But I will not lose my family, my blood, my race in one day.”
“You will die trying to rescue her,” Ethan said with grim matter-of-factness. “If there was hope, I’d give you some.”
“I don’t need your hope,” Kozo replied. He turned and looked full at Ethan, planted in the center of the hull, he looked out the window and saw the moon reflecting on the open water. “I am grateful for your help and your warnings and I think I’ll sleep now.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll be hitting land for a few days. Meet up with a few of my friends and our allies…swap some boats. Look, they’ll all be honest with you, too, and tell you some stories that will paint a better picture.”
Ethan rubbed the heel of his right hand against his upper thigh and massaged the muscles. Up on the deck, they could hear the brother singing a song and it carried down to them in bursts with the wind. Kozo didn’t recognize the music but he hadn’t grown up with much singing in his life. For all he knew, the boy was making up his own melody and casting it out to the waves.
“You’ve been hospitable and kind. Is it possible to commandeer a boat in the next marina for me?”
“Uh-huh,” Ethan answered in the affirmative, frowning. “Sure. We’re not some militia group hoarding the resources…that’s not us. You wanna go out on your own, fine, but they’ll find you…”
“I’ll be headed to Bermuda. No doubt.”
“You’re persistent. Can’t tell yet if it’ll suit you.”
The Bedrock Page 12